Doc: Heavy shoveling revealed the Bengals way

Marvin Lewis loved the shovel. Remember the shovel? It was right there next to the axe that chopped the wood. Keep shoveling, keep chopping wood. Pound the rock, not your head against the wall. Keep trying.

Willie Anderson kept the shovel in his locker. Anderson wore the T-shirt that said Do Your Job. Everybody in the Bengals locker room wore those T-shirts, back in the day.

Lewis stressed the shoveling. Changing the Bengals culture required massive shoveling. Backhoes were needed. And dynamite and dump trucks, to haul away all the bad habits and inertia. Have you seen the sawed-off mountaintops in West Virginia coal country? It was like that.

It's different now. So different that all 11 starters on offense were drafted by the Bengals, within the first five rounds. Nineteen of the 22 players projected to start in Baltimore Sunday, the Bengals drafted. "Guys we've grown, to do it our way,'' Lewis noted Wednesday.

(No, smart guy, the local Way isn't to win 10 games in the regular season, then lose in a playoff opener.)

The Steelers have a Way. The Ravens have a Way. Forever, the Bengals lost their way.

Things have changed. The Bengals target certain types of players on Draft Day. They draft smart players, who can carry a conversation and understand a playbook. They draft character, not characters. When the Bengals take risks, it is with players – Vontaze Burfict, Adam Jones -- they're not depending on or desperately need.

They welcome second-chance players, both rookies and veterans, most of whom arrive here with boulders on their shoulders and the proverbial Something to Prove. The Bengals are no longer in situations where they have to reach for a problem player, the way they did with Cedric Benson in 2008, which seems like the Dark Ages now.

The Bengals want players who don't need the shovel. Even if Lewis thinks they do. "The shovel's still important,'' he said. "We have to every day reinforce things. How we do things, we can't let it waver.''

Lewis' biggest concern with promoting Paul Guenther and Hue Jackson to defensive and offensive coordinators was not that they would be new to their jobs. It was that their familiarity with their players would breed a complacency. That somehow, the shoveling would cease.

National experts have suggested that incorporating two new coordinators is no way to return to the playoffs. But Jackson and Guenther aren't walking in from Buffalo, re-inventing wheels. Guenther has been here a decade, coaching linebackers, defensive backs and special teams. Jackson has been here twice, first as receivers coach in the Carson-Chad-TJ Era, then back two years ago, as an assistant.

"It's all the same stuff,'' said Adam Jones of the transition to Guenther. "He has coached everybody in here. Guys in here believe in the scheme.''

"We know the defense like the back of our hand,'' said Leon Hall. "Same as the last few years.''

As for Jackson?

"We have the same core system. The camaraderie between coaches and players is the same. The foundation is the same,'' said wideout Marvin Jones. "There hasn't been a shakedown at all.''

"I like the intangible'' with Jackson, said Andrew Whitworth. "How you play, how you finish, the effort.''

The effort hasn't lagged. I asked Lewis how the public would have known, watching the Bengals in August, that the change in coordinators hadn't been smooth. "What we didn't have was a lot of mental breakdowns. Foolish penalties,'' he said. "Things that look chaotic.''

You never fully appreciate that your favorite team is in the midst of a good run of seasons, until the run ends. Since 2011, the Bengals have been on a very good run. They have a plan or a vision or whatever you want to call it, of who they want to be and where they want to go. That wasn't always the case, even in the first half of what is now 12 years of the Marvin Era.

The national media remains skeptical. They're usually the last to catch on.

Lewis is skeptical, too, in his own way. He doesn't trust success.

"The attention to detail is so important,'' he said. "You always have to earn your right (to play).''

This year's motivational T-shirt message is Challenge The Moment. What does that mean? Who knows?